I’m jumping the gun on this a bit, but… my year in writing correspondence: Number of stories published: 1 (vs 1 in ’09)Number of stories subbed: 4 (vs 5 in ’09)Rejections: 7 (vs 8 in ’09)Sales to pro markets: 1 (vs 2 in ’09)Fastest response: 2 days (rejection from Clarkesworld)Slowest response: Tor.com (still pending, subbed in July)Most rejected story: 3 and countingMost accepted story: bought on third shot (one of last year’s sales was bought on the first shot) Since I do still have 2 stories on sub right now, and the number of data points in my stats is very small, this year’s percentages could still change fairly dramatically in terms of stories sold vs unsold. The important thing for myself to note, though, is that I am still horribly fucking unproductive. I am like those smokers who tell everyone on earth that they’re quitting, in the hopes that they’ll embarrass themselves into actually doing it. You! Bear witness! I am going to be less unproductive in 2011. […]
Just another pair of boat shoes walking away from the harbour
I have lost my speaking voice, and this may be some of the reason I’ve written so many words this week. I am endeavouring to bring it back with a finger of Bowmore, since spoons of honey have not worked, and I am out of lemons. (Yum! Scotch for medicinal purposes!) I continue to be utterly seduced by Bane-Day, leaving poor Compass to swing, for the moment. The task at hand is never the most attractive, for some reason; it’s the sidelines, the long shots, that draw me. And I engage in every kind of magical thinking. If I listen to this song. If I perform these exercises. If I am a good enough girl. If I am a bad enough woman. If I guess at all of the strictures of the hidden universe, she, and he, and you, will buy my work. […]
new Ideomancer, and some musings
First: Ideomancer‘s December issue is up, and it includes, as always, wonderful stories, poems, and reviews (including my review of Sarah Court, a book which I think you should read, unless you are my mother, in which case it is much too dark for you.) Second: I am actually writing right now, but my husband and cat are watching Pingu, which is distracting. (Watching the cat watch the show is even more distracting than the show itself. He would eat Pingu if he could.) Third: awesome word counts this month. Revised “A Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia,” and am almost finished “Gardens for the Blind” (which is about to have a new title, since I discovered Janet Frame wrote a story by that name). Also about to finish Chapter 4 of Compass of Chicago. It helps that the weather’s gone dark, colder than I like for running, and I’m not travelling again until after Christmas, and I have all these pent-up words. […]
In which I remember: today is Labour Day
On Queen Street, the marchers sing “Solidarity Forever” as they pass through the rain. I drink coffee and warm my bare feet upon the stomach of my cat. Autumn’s upon us, and I must waste no more time. […]
Release Chirpy Helium
…is now my favourite anagram of my own name, which is rather difficult to rearrange satisfactorily. (A close tie is “cheerily hales impure”.) I am releasing chirpy helium by making an incredibly fey dance mix and playing it at top volume: everything from Felix Da Housecat to Lady Gaga to You Say Party! We Say Die!. The bubbliness of this dance mix is designed to offset a grey cold day, fighter jets screaming over to the airshow, frightened cats under the bed, and the intolerable bleakness of my damned book. It’s Draft 2 Central at my house today, and as much as I love my creation, it’s a scary and sad creation, to which I have not been kind. (Maybe it needs a bride.) As often happens to me, what began as an attempt at light fiction has (d)evolved into a book about family damage, loss, violence and suicide. (Mom: you won’t want to read this one, ever.) Simultaneous to all this horror, of course, is a voluptuous knuckle-cracking excitement: I made this, and I’m making it better, and eventually, I shall make you read it. […]
Tell me, brother, don’t you understand–we’re all working for the Pharaoh
I have two free hours. Go! And really, the words are there; but they’re scabbed over a bit, or dried out, or atrophied. My eyes blur and run. I’ve been looking at screens fifteen hours a day this week. My shoulder aches. This cannot be allowed to matter. Drive the body, my sergeant used to say. And I say: Drive the soul. […]
State of the Clairification Nation
I’ve been rather delinquent since finishing the Not-a-Werewolf Book, which still doesn’t have a real title. I’ve had that horrible impotent feeling: I want to write, and I don’t want substitutes, but when I sit down to make words, they just don’t feel exciting. This does not stop me from making words. I don’t do writer’s block. I do, however, crave like a drug the ultimate exultation of making words that are really good. Hence my excitement today: finally getting somewhere excellent with “Railway Guns of the Northern Rockies”, which has been kicking around my brain for a few months. I am going to love this story. Other stories in progress: “Forty-Nine Days in the Intermediate States, with Extracts from the Great Liberation by Hearing”: needs attention, but it makes me sad to work on it. I think I’ll get back to it next month. “Rush Lane”: Almost done, and shaping up nicely now that I know what the hell it’s actually about. “Seven Postcards from the Garden of Earthly Delights”: About to be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch with the same floor plan yet a totally different architectural style. “Sovereign Cure for Pneumonia”: Advances on this […]
In which I am abject
I have not eaten and I cannot be bothered to eat. My eyes ache, and I cannot be bothered to take out my lenses. I almost didn’t bother to shower, but the pleasure I take in scented soaps is a pleasure that rarely fails me. I cannot even say I haven’t been working. I have been. It just hasn’t been enough, and it hasn’t opened the trapdoor in the upper reaches of my brain. I’m addicted to a drug of my own making. And once in a very great while, I cannot supply it for myself, and so I walk around craving, and nothing else suffices. All of which is to say: the post-novel burnout hasn’t gone away yet. One of these days I’m going to wake up with an original thought in my head, and I’m going to put more than a few words in a row again, and it’s going to be absolutely wonderful… and until then, I’m going to ghost around the house and eat stale crackers for lunch and listen to Wilco all day. Kids: just say no to writing. […]
A storm has beaten all the petals from the roses, and still wrings water from the clouds. I’m indoors, and I’m finally alone. The list of things to accomplish this weekend is a grand one, but as usual, I’ll be content so long as I have a few hours in my worlds. The rest is silence (and laundry, and avoiding the telephone). […]
Decemberists, and sleepwalking
The Decemberists are my obsession du jour, and fortunately one that my husband does not find unspeakably annoying (unlike, say, Joanna Newsom). I’ve been inhabiting their world for several months now; as I often do with musical obsessions, buying as many albums at once as I can find, and putting them all on random rotation. Why mention it? Because, like Kate Bush and Tori Amos, the Decemberists have become essential to this particular phase of my work, in some inarticulate way. I must have them. I think they’re eminently suitable music for any fantasy writer, in fact. I’m not likely to forget it, but I note it here because I like to chart these things; at some time in the future I’ll look back on this period and want to recapture a mood or a thought, and I’ll have the musical key ready. And now for the sleepwalking portion of the post; it is related to writing only tangentially, because when I woke up, I found myself at my computer. Fortunately, I had not actually messed with anything much; I’d apparently read an email from the Viable Paradise group, and that was all. I am now going to back up […]